Jamstack
Jamstack is an approach to building websites that pre-renders pages and serves them from a CDN, adding dynamic features through JavaScript and APIs.
The idea
The name stood for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. Instead of rendering every page on a server per request, you build pages ahead of time, deploy them to a CDN, and call APIs from the browser for anything dynamic. Netlify popularized the term around 2016.
Where it went
The ideas won so thoroughly that the label faded. Modern frameworks like Astro and Next.js mix pre-rendering, server rendering, and edge rendering per page, so "Jamstack" stopped being a distinct architecture.
What's left
The lasting parts are the ones code-first websites rely on: content and code in Git, sites built on every commit, and pages served fast from the edge. A Git-based CMS is the editing layer that grew out of that world.